Fool's Error
by Bolt6
Summary: Loving heroes, Ginny reflected, was a fool’s error. Heroes belong to everyone and thus they belong to no one. It was a lesson she was learning slowly, but painfully." Ginny looks back on her years of loving Harry.


Nothing here is mine, I'm just borrowing what belongs to JKR.

Loving heroes, Ginny reflected, was a fool's error. Heroes belong to everyone and thus they belong to no one. It was a lesson she was learning slowly, but painfully. Truth be told, she should have realized it sooner. She had spent almost half of her life watching people love a hero, loving a hero herself, but she'd fallen prey to the cliché and been blinded by that love.

She didn't blame herself for not realizing it when she was ten. She was not at Hogwarts that year and so she did not watch Ron and Hermione sit for hours in the hospital wing, watching Harry lay there for weeks. She did not watch Madame Pomfrey rub burn ointment on his bleeding hands, or hear Harry later explain that Quirrel and through him You-Know-Who had tried to kill him. How Harry had almost died so that Dumbledore could begin to teach him the lessons of heroism. She wasn't there, so if she didn't understand what loving Harry would mean then that was okay.

When she was eleven she should have had an inkling, but she was confused—hell, she was possessed—so not understanding was still acceptable. But she'd seen Harry's face when Hermione was attacked. Later she learned he'd dragged Ron into the Forbidden Forest for answers and sometimes she wondered if he knew he could die. Then he almost had died. She knew it wasn't really for her, that he would have killed the Basilisk for anyone really. What had Hermione called it? His "saving people thing." Right as usual, because he always had to save everyone; everyone except himself. That summer she'd had nightmares almost every night and Ron—in an effort to consol her—had confessed that he still woke up at night clawing the air like he was trying to dig a way through the stones that had blocked him from her, and from Harry. Loving heroes, it seemed, would give you nightmares.

Her second year taught her what could happen to people who loved heroes. Oh, later she learned it had all been an illusion, that Sirius Black was innocent and Harry's godfather. But that year she'd thought he was trying to kill Harry, that he had almost killed Ron. That year it had been Ron in the hospital wing. First Harry, then Hermione, then Ron. If she'd been clever she would have seen the pattern, but Harry drew people into his world. When you were with him you _knew_ that he had to act and that you could only follow. Months later she would wonder why Dumbledore never went back in time, why he always arrived at the end when everything was finished. Even later she would understand that this was what it took to make a hero, that Dumbledore had been shaping Harry from the day he left that baby boy with the Dursleys. And she would learn that he too, had made the fool's error and learned to love the hero.

But she hadn't really thought about it until her third year, and even then, when she experienced the dawning realization that she was an idiot, that loving Harry was foolhardy at best, even then it was an accident. She'd turned to tell Hermione that she'd known Harry would be alright during the Tournament and as a result she'd missed what everyone else saw. When he and Cedric vanished she'd been staring at Ron and Hermione's faces, and while the rest of the crowd spent the next several minutes stunned, confused as to whether the vanishing champions had been part of the plan, she'd seen the horror on their faces. Seen Ron's expression crumple into panic and the blood drain from Hermione's face and then watched as they made a scramble out of their seats so that Ron could lose his dinner away from the crowd. They'd been Harry's best friend for too long to believe that his disappearance could be anything good. Ron and Hermione had known what she, Ginny, was just beginning to understand: loving Harry wasn't just about dreaming nightmares, but living them as well.

Fourth year she got a taste of what Hermione and Ron already knew—the addicting adrenaline that followed Harry when he was in the middle of something. And he was always in the middle of something. Whether it was learning spells in the DA or flying on thestrals to fight Death Eaters, Harry Potter drew action like a candle attracted moths, and often with the same result for the moth. Or so Ginny reflected when she later heard of what happened during Voldemort's possession of Harry. In the moment it was exhilarating, fighting beside him, knowing that everything you did in those moments _mattered _with an intensity that would never be true of a life lived in the confines of a Hogwarts classroom or the safety of the Burrow. But there was always a price: Ron, temporarily insane, Hermione, critically injured, and Sirius…dead.

By the fifth year it was too late—she'd fallen completely and while she'd always known she'd loved him its silence had made it safe. Now officially with Harry Potter, she'd thought that destiny had stepped in to bless their relationship. _The hero gets the girl_, she'd told herself and if she'd envisioned in that moment fighting by his side, his equal and partner in a war to save the world, well, she might have been excused. She'd allowed herself in those sunlight days to forget what she'd learned so many times from watching Ron and Hermione wait, snapping at one another out of nerves and glancing anxiously at the clock: that, in the end, to be a hero, Harry would have to stand alone.

So she'd watched him go, leave her behind while he did the only thing he knew how to do. She'd tried not to remember what he had felt like in her arms, warm, slightly tensed as though worried he would somehow hold her the wrong way. He'd been wonderfully human in those moments, with tendons she could trace on his hands and heartbeats she could feel if she held him close enough. Not like a hero, but a human. She'd tried herself to be a hero in her sixth year, fighting for what was right, but in her heart fighting for her hero. Which brought her to where she was now, her heart battering its way out of her chest as she stares at the boy in Hagrid's arms. Loving heroes is a fool's error, but as she stares at Harry's lifeless face she realizes that for years now she hasn't loved the hero at all. She's loved Harry, and this was the most foolish decision of all. Because heroes are built on ideas that cannot die, even after the last Killing Curse has been cast. But as she stares at Harry— with his tendons and heartbeats and crooked glasses and eyes as green as a fresh-pickled toad –she realizes that loving a person, not the hero, but the boy, means watching him die.


End file.
